Teachers Face Test Of Their Own In Exam Preparations

June 07, 2000|By Michael Martinez, Tribune Education Writer.

When 10th graders at Westinghouse High School on Chicago's West Side took a nationally standardized reading exam last month, they noticed that several questions were identical to ones teachers had given them to study, school board officials said this week.

That may sound like cheating, but a subsequent board inquiry has cleared Westinghouse of wrongdoing. The questions, teachers told investigators, came from old, out-of-circulation exams used to prepare students, which officials said is an accepted practice in Chicago and other districts.

Nevertheless, the incident highlights the precarious situation facing teachers and administrators who want to prepare their students to take high-stakes tests.

Legitimate "test prep," experts said, informs students of an exam's format without having too many similar questions.

"It's a fine line we walk between preparing them to having been given information that would invalidate the scores," said Cozette Buckney, the Chicago board's chief education officer.

Preparation becomes complicated when questions deal with facts and definitions, such as what is the diameter of a circle or, in the area of reading, what is a main idea. Such questions leave little room for rewording.

While Chicago school officials said the Westinghouse incident won't lead to a widespread inquiry into how schools use prep materials, they urged educators to use sound judgment in preparing students. The Westinghouse investigators are considering looking into whether the publisher of the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency recycled old questions, officials said.

After students pointed out the similar questions, a Westinghouse teacher became concerned and called the board.

Officials said she had seen news accounts last week of cheating allegations at Carpenter Elementary School, where staff members allegedly altered 8th graders' response sheets to bolster scores. Eighth graders at Carpenter were retested in reading Monday and were retested in math Tuesday, officials said.

Like Carpenter, Westinghouse High saw big jumps in test scores this year, according to preliminary results. In fact, Westinghouse is now in a position to be removed from the board's academic probation list, officials said.

But Blondean Davis, the board's chief of schools and regions, said "there was no cheating" at Westinghouse.

An official with Riverside Publishing, which publishes TAP and its elementary counterpart, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, said she was not familiar with the Westinghouse case and that questions in the firm's prep materials don't match the real test.

Maureen DiMarco, vice president of educational and governmental affairs for Houghton Mifflin, the parent firm of Riverside, said she was not sure if other firms publish prep material for TAP.

Experts said there is a range of acceptable and inappropriate preparation techniques.

"Some of it is, how do you take a multiple-choice test? That's legitimate," said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, a national group that contends standardized tests are flawed instruments.

"Then you start to get into the type of things that we won't teach this year because it's not on the test. This starts the slide to inappropriate test prep. And then you start doing test prep with things that look just like the test and dropping the rest of the stuff. We ought to think of that as basically cheating, and we should begin to recognize that the results on the test are no longer believable.